+ The pulse of the search marketing community

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 1, 2008"

A Cre8asite Forums thread discusses the ramifications of giving out SEO for a fee on a one-time basis rather than having a long-term consulting project. Not all individuals are equipped to handle lengthy engagements nor do they really have the time. Is it worth it, then, to give advice to people who don't know how to manage their sites to explain that their visibility is at a complete minimum?

Absolutely. EGOL explains that he's already done this for some friends. He explains that the service he provides shows that the client websites are invisible in search. He then gives them keywords to optimize for and teaches them how to write for search. They work on the copy, send him an update, and made basic optimization changes (rewrote title tags, removed frames, etc.) With these optimization changes, they got 20 times more traffic than they previously received.

iamlost goes a step further to say that there are two ways you can package this deal. One can be an economy option: you suggest changes, and they'd implement them. The second more full-fledged package would be the gamut: you offer the advice and apply the corrections.

There is a breadth of information in this forum discussion, and I barely scratched the surface with this summary. Please read and engage in the lengthy discussion at Crea8site Forums.

What does one in this industry do when they find out that one of their own is out of a job? In most industries, everyone just says "sorry" and then they go on about their day. But not on Search Engine Watch Forums. Long-standing member abbottsys is about to close a door on a job he's had for awhile but forum members are keeping his spirits up. Even AdWordsRep has recounted memories of a not-so-plentiful past where the job market wasn't really working out for him either. The words of encouragement, however, were to keep his head held up high.

One forum member is already jumping to get abbottsys on board and is encouraging him to apply for a new job.

It's great to see how this industry actually cares about each other and how it's a community and a family.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Google Groups thread discusses the ramifications content warning pages have on search engine visibility. See, if your blog has questionable content, the Google Blogger platform will put up a warning page. However, the problem is that this page itself impacts visibility in the search engines substantially. The problem is described here:

The content warning page uses a DIV-tag/javascript for the relevant button. There is no regular link from the Content Warning page to the blog itself.

Even if Blogger is a part of Google, no one has apparently told the Google spiders how to find away around this javascript.

So what happens now? JohnMu acknowledged that Google is aware of the issue, but there's no fix for it just yet.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups (#1) and Google Groups (#2).

It seems like we have confirmed reports from a Googler in Google Groups that Google's video crawler, part of the GoogleBot family, is not playing nice. In short, even though you may be telling Google not to crawl your videos, they will anyway.

One person said it has been going on for 1.5 months already and he has no idea what else to do.

JohnMu from Google apologized saying:

I've passed this on to the video search team to look at (and fix :-)). I don't know how soon you will see changes, but now that they're informed things should generally change soon. If you don't see a change in a few weeks, please post back here again.

Hopefully this will be fixed shortly.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Update: John commented with a clarification and I wanted to make sure you all saw it:

Hi Barry, I just wanted to clarify something quickly on this - it's not that we're not following the directives (to disallow crawling). Instead, we've already crawled these URLs earlier and even with a disallow statement they'll generally remain in the index for a while (which is how it generally works with robots.txt files). I was hoping that they would drop out quicker, which seems to be what the webmaster would prefer.

Senior WebmasterWorld member, CainIV, has been running an experiment for just about two months now. The experiment is to test to see how changing your navigation links from "home," to a keyword, to another keyword, can impact your rankings.

Yes, this experiment is an internal linking strategy test.

The WebmasterWorld thread is here and it started by on October 1st. It is now December 1st, and CainIV is sharing some results. He said:

I have found that if a website is launched with those footer to home keyword links, then it is almost as if Google ignores those. However, if they are added or removed as the website begins to rank, in general the rankings go south.

Be careful when adding or removing those footer links!:)

It is important to note that these link changes are all pointing to the home page.

CainIV seems like he will be sharing more of this experiment, so check out the thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am hearing reports from Search Engine Watch Forums that Google is now testing text ad formats for ads on Google Image search.

You can see two screen captures of this in action, one at AccuraCast.com and the other at Michael Gray's blog.

In the most recent ads on Google image search we saw image or banner ads on image search. Now it appears Google is going back to the more textual based ad format.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google is still offering search tips to help searchers become more efficient searchers. In short, Google offered what they call a "tip" at the top of the search results, directly above the organic results. The tip read:

Tip: hit return instead of clicking on the search button to save time.

I tried to duplicate this tip by searching over and over again and clicking on the search button, but I was unsuccessful.

This is not the first time Google has offered such search tips. Gary Price reported this almost three years ago in January 2006. He even posted a screen capture if you are interested in seeing it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: November 28, 2008"

Happy Thanksgiving everyone, I am posting the video early in celebration of the special weekend. I spoke for a while on why SEO's should be careful when using a site command. I also spoke a while about link building companies and how they are being perceived these days. Google is allowing some advertisers the ability to show ads based on mobile devices or desktop devices. Yahoo had a search update. Live Search added malware reporting to Webmaster Tools. Google improved Street Views in Maps. Google is cutting on contractors. Will Google give out holiday gifts this year? SEMPO will be ringing the bell at the NASDAQ. Learn how to save on this year's holiday gifts with Live Search Cashback!

Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed (note: If YouTube shows a video not found message, just refresh the page and play it again, it is a YouTube bug):

For the original iTunes version, click here

Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Happy Thanksgiving '08 From The Search Industry
• Why Shouldn't SEOs Obsess Over the Site Command
• When Did Link Building Companies Become "Black Hat" SEOs?
• Google AdWords Provides Option To Advertise Based on Desktop vs. iPhone
• Was There a November Yahoo Update?
• Live Search Adds Malware Reporting to Webmaster Tools
• Google Enhances Street View
• Google Plans Layoffs of Nearly 1/3 of the Workforce
• Will Google Be Giving Holiday Gifts Out This Year?
• SEMPO Has Been Invited to Ring NASDAQ's Bell
• See How To Save 25% On Holiday Gifts With Microsoft Cashback

Please do subscribe via iTunes or on your favorite RSS reader. Don't forget to comment below with the right answer and good luck!

Hope you guys had a great yesterday and a happy day today! Most of you I know aren't actually working, but some of us are, and we're going to make sure you're well-entertained today in what happened this week in the search industry.

Happy Thanksgiving!
How was your Thanksgiving? Hopefully you enjoyed turkey or tofurkey and spent some quality time with your family. I know I did. The search industry, naturally, celebrated with us with some high quality themes.

The site: Command isn't Reliable. Chill
Too many SEOs are obsessed with the site: command, but there's really no reason to be. The site: command doesn't always count the number of pages that are indexed in your site, so if you notice a drop, you shouldn't necessarily freak out. The thing is -- some people do. Perhaps it's better to think of alternative strategies, like looking at which keywords your site pages rank for.

Why Do People Consider Link Buying a Black Hat Tactic?
Last week, we had a blogger say that Microsoft endorsing link exchanges means they're approving a "black hat" tactic. Lately, too many people have considered link buying a black hat tactic too. Consequently, companies are trying to stop link buying and move to more "ethical" measures.

Yahoo Says it Updated -- Did it?
Yahoo said it was performing a search index update. But that's all that happened. Nobody knows if Yahoo did anything about an update, and they're just waiting and waiting and wondering what's next.

Malware in Live Search Tools
As anticipated at Pubcon, Live Search has added malware reporting to their Webmaster Tools arsenal. You can use this data to find out if malware is linking to you, or if you're linking to malware sites. I think this is a very cool idea.

Google's Street View Gets Better
Google is making street view more enhanced with new features. The pegman is now more visible and you can drag him from the zoom slider to activate street view. That's not all either: you can report concerns more easily and enjoy a mini map view to get two different views at all times. Cool.

Google Terminates Contractors - You Better Hope You Aren't One
Google seems to only value their long term employees, and instead has axed their contractors, which has been going under the radar for several months until someone caught wind of these activities. Looks like Google isn't as great as everyone thought it was.

And will Google Even Give Gifts This Year?
Now that we're in the midst of a recession and Google is dropping valued and dedicated contractors, should we expect gifts from them this year? It's that time -- do you think Google will deliver?

Google Releases Blogger Best Practice Guide
If you're a blogger and you're writing for search engines (I mean PEOPLE, people!), you should consider reading Google's blogger best practice guide which was released earlier this week.

SEMPO and NASDAQ = <3
SEMPO has been given a great honor to ring NASDAQ's bell next week. They may have struggled in their initial first year, but they have prevailed -- and now, you can see that SEMPO is shining. I'm very proud of all those who are participating in the honor. Congratulations!

Microsoft Cash Back Rocks!
My friend told me a few weeks ago that Microsoft Cash Back has made a $900 camera purchase $700 -- yes, a $200 savings. He used this trick to utilize Microsoft Cash Back and he's extremely happy. I guess you can win from utilizing Microsoft's search engine in this capacity, so take advantage of it while it lasts!

Have a good weekend!

Google has announced new technological strides: they have been able to sort 1 terabyte of data across one-thousand computers in a mere 68 seconds. (Previously, the same record of 1TB was across 910 computers and took 209 seconds.) For one petabyte of data, it took Google 6 hours and 2 minutes to do the sorting -- and the sorted data gets moved to 48,000 hard drives (crazy!)

Google also acknowledges that they had triple redundancy -- the data was backed up on 3 hard drives. Could it be that if you reduced that redundancy, this would all be much quicker? Not necessarily, since storing may not be part of the sorting algorithm that was recorded (and storing the data could have still been ongoing after the sort had been completed).

Do you call this "nerd erotica?" Forum members say it is.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

According to Nielsen as reported by CNET and according to comScore as reported by BusinessWeek, Google search shares went up for the month of October.

Nielsen reports that Google's search went up 8.1 percent (to a total of 61.2 percent). comScore's findings were similar: Google now has a 63.1 search share (up from 58.5 percent from last year).

Not surprisingly, Hitwise shows a higher Google search share of 71.86%.

But some think that Google has only a little to celebrate. After all, after Google opted users into SearchWiki (which I call SearchIcky), they think the users won't accept the change (since Google should be fair and make that an option not a necessity).

That Google SearchWiki thing might help shift some people back to Y!, MSFT & others.

Heck, maybe Google will see that people don't want it and should give us the option to choose whether we do.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Matt McGee writes at Search Engine Land that SEMPO has been invited to ring NASDAQ's bell in New York City on December 1st. This is a huge honor for SEMPO and it indicates that the organization has been doing quite well this past year. SEMPO has been asked as a result of a big deal with Microsoft where they are working with Microsoft adCenter.

Of course, everyone is super excited -- this is great news for the search marketing organization.

This is especially true after their early struggles and questions on if SEMPO will survive or not. They proved to show that not only have they survived, but they have been an important part of the search industry.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A Google Groups thread confirms the sad news of Palm's future. Google has decided not to spend the time, money and resources to build out a new version of the Google Maps for Mobile specifically for the Palm OS.

Googler, Tom, from the Google Mobile team said:

I don't anticipate any new versions of Google Maps for mobile coming to Palm OS in the near future. I know this isn't news you'd like to hear, but the team has decided to focus their efforts on other mobile platforms at this time.

I assume, if Palm ever regains some popularity, Google would then develop more for that OS. But with Android, the iPhone, BlackBerry and other popular mobile devices - it seems like Palm and the Treo have seen their day.

Personally, this does make me a bit sad, since I was a huge Treo fan. That is of course, until I purchased the first generation iPhone and continued on to get the iPhone 3G.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.